The Old Warrior

By Jane Smiley

Published: November 11, 2007

For American children in the '50s, westerns were the default entertainment option. If it wasn't Roy Rogers then it was Hopalong Cassidy or the Lone Ranger. In the evening, with the parents, ''Have Gun -- Will Travel.'' Every kid had a fringed vest, a pair of toy six-shooters and a cowboy hat. We played cowboys and Indians and, if we were girls, imagined ourselves in bonnets and long dresses, with names like Miss Kitty. It was numbing.

In years of gunfights, cattle drives, galloping horses and saloons, only one movie ever galvanized me, one I saw on TV, in black and white: ''Broken Arrow,'' with Jeff Chandler as Cochise, James Stewart as Tom Jeffords and Debra Paget as the Apache girl Stewart is allowed to marry. Stewart was a real movie star, and I must have noticed him, but what sticks in my mind is the very thing that made the movie startling when it came out in 1950 -- the fact that it is sympathetic to the Native American point of view, as represented by Chandler, strikingly handsome and dignified as Cochise, and Jay Silverheels, rough-voiced and dynamic, as Geronimo.

By contrast, of course, no other Native American character in those days, not even Tonto, was allowed a point of view, and so the movie's steady focus on Cochise was a novelty and won Chandler an Academy Award nomination.

Now, after 50 intervening years of real Native American voices in literature and after such films as HBO's recent ''Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,'' the movie seems na?: well meaning but inauthentic. Jeff Chandler looks like what he was, a 32-year-old from Brooklyn named Ira Grossel with prematurely gray hair, rather than a 60-year-old Apache warrior, but his point of view is still affecting.

He understands, if Geronimo doesn't, that his band is outnumbered by the incoming whites. He supposes that gaining control of a piece of land is his best bet, if the whites can be trusted. Many of the whites, however, can't be trusted. Local ranchers are frightened, racist and greedy, not necessarily in that order. Some of the Apaches aren't above a bit of treachery, either. Peace, as the movie shows, is often dangerous and difficult, but worth it. That wasn't a bad lesson for a girl growing up in the shadow of the cold war